Late last year Daniel Bozeman, a software engineer at wireless analytics firm Mosaik Solutions, wanted to build a private cloud. The company is a heavy user of Amazon Web Services public cloud resources, and Bozeman had a vision of creating a system that would allow him to seamlessly run workloads either in the company's own data center, or in Amazon's public cloud.

He looked into OpenStack, but when he was investigating in late 2011, the feature sets just weren't there -- at the time the open source cloud platform didn't have a block storage service similar to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), which it has since added. (See full article)